Ghetto tracker has now been removed following a Twitter campaign. Picture: Supplied.Source: NewsComAu

A website and app called "Ghetto Tracker", designed to help people avoid going to the "bad" part of town has been taken down after it was attacked on Twitter for being racist.

Featuring a smiling white family on the home page, Ghetto Tracker purported to be an innocent travel tool for wary tourists wanting to keep out of trouble.

It posed the questions, "Travelling to a new city? Will you be visiting a safe part of town?" and the reassurance, "Ghetto Tracker can help determine which parts of town are safe and which parts are not."

The way the app worked was to allow locals to rate the safety of different parts of a given area.

The site appeared last weekend, and within 24 hours it was causing a stir on Twitter, with tweets from Americans accusing it of playing on people's fears and, Gawker said, being "a racist, classist app for helping the rich to avoid the poor".

Apart from the racist associations of the site's name - a ghetto is traditionally a poor area inhabited by African Americans, people were angry the site appeared to allow anyone to arbitrarily decide which neighbourhoods were good or bad, rather than rely on crime statistics.

Apparently responding to the criticism, the site's owner took down the photograph of the all white family, replaced it with a picture of an ethnically diverse family and changed the name from "Ghetto Tracker" to "Good Part of Town".

In addition to the name change, all mention of the word "ghetto" had been removed from the site.

After being attacked on Twitter, the owner of “Ghetto Tracker” changed the site’s name to “Good Part of Town and replaced the white family with a black family. Picture: Supplied.Source: NewsComAu

Gawker decided to follow up who had started the site, which it described as "deplorable" and which PandoDaily said was "pretty detrimental to society when we reinforce the idea that poor or crime-heavy areas are places to be categorically avoided or shamed".

In an email sent to Gawker, the app's team claimed it changed the name not in to the racist accusations, but in response to emails from a woman whose family had been contained in an actual World War II ghetto and one from a man who grew up in a struggling area and went on to graduate from college and overcome his upbringing.

"I can't be held responsible for the assumptions people may make in regards to factors like race and income," the email to Gawker said, "I've seen comments on blogs and in twitter that are trying to say this is encouraging racism or social stratification and that was never our intention."

Two Twitter sleuths identified the person behind Ghetto tracker as Casey Smith, the president of a Florida-based company called Web Design.

Mr Smith has denied the connection.

An email to Gawker claimed from the (unnamed) creator of the site said Ghetto Tracker "was meant to be something that people would remember. Well, it worked, but unfortunately, it appears to have brought a lot of negative baggage along with it.

"The idea was to make it social, as if you were asking a friend, "Hey, I'm going to be visiting [your city] and thinking of staying at [some hotel], is that a good area?".

A NOTE ABOUT RELEVANT ADVERTISING: We collect information about the content (including ads) you use across this site and use it to make both advertising and content more relevant to you on our network and other sites.